


love-lies-bleeding

by fensandmarshes



Category: Dream SMP (Video Blogging RPF)
Genre: Cara | CaptainPuffy-centric, Dream Team SMP Spoilers, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Language of Flowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:53:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29816298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fensandmarshes/pseuds/fensandmarshes
Summary: Puffy has a secret graveyard, filled with headstones and flowers and broken promises.
Relationships: Cara | CaptainPuffy & Clay | Dream, Cara | CaptainPuffy & Dream SMP Ensemble, Cara | CaptainPuffy & TommyInnit, No Romantic Relationship(s)
Comments: 35
Kudos: 67





	love-lies-bleeding

**Author's Note:**

> spoilers for march 1,,,,,,,,,,,,
> 
> this is about dsmp characters, not irl people!

Puffy has a secret graveyard, filled with headstones and flowers and broken promises. No one else has ever seen it. She mourns every life lost in the peace of her own garden, far away from the world-spawn and accessible only through a hidden tunnel in the Nether; there are daises, and no bodies buried beneath them. The headstones number many. 

_ TommyInnit, of an arrow through the chest, for independence, _ reads one. She always commemorates the children.  _ I will never kill anyone, _ reads another; she planted that broken promise with a cutting of the plum that waves at her through the window of her cottage, scattering its blossoms. The ones that land on that headstone wilt and wither.  _ Niki’s sweetness _ is buried with primroses and white carnations.  _ Schlatt, of a broken heart, _ reads one of the smaller headstones; she doesn’t mourn him, quite, but a death is a death.

She’s on her knees in the garden; the headstone is ready, but she always plants the seed first, like burying a body. A scrap of paper has been torn from her notebook and now rests in her hand; she casts her eyes over it one more time, committing it to memory, before wrapping it around the amaranthus seeds and plunging it all into water. The ink will have run, now, but she knows what it says even as she buries it.  _ Love-lies-bleeding. Hopeless, but not helpless. There is yet another time for you. _

Next time, she’ll plant frangipanis. There’s resurrection yet to come, she’s sure of it. (Wilbur’s hellebores are squat and accusatory behind her -  _ cure to madness, remedy of melancholy _ \- but she ignores them, steadfast, turns her back on their bowed pink heads.) For now, Puffy folds the earth over the amaranthus and pours water over it, like a mother wiping tears from her child’s cheek.

She should have been there.

Next time, she will be there.

It’s just another gravestone in her garden, and as she sets the headstone in place its lettering glares her in the eye, in the chest, and it reads  _ TommyInnit, of helplessness and hopelessness, at the hands of someone who would already be long dead if I had my way with him _ and what it means is  _ he lay bleeding, Puffy was told, and there was no one to watch him but his murderer. _ What it means is  _ yet another child you couldn’t save; some sea-mother, some hero. _ What it means is _ you did this, and not even just by not being there; you are the reason he is dead. _

(One of the oldest headstones in the graveyard is surrounded by flowers, dripping with them. Cinquefoils,  _ motherly love, beloved duckling,  _ nodding their little yellow heads, and buttercups,  _ memories of childhood, _ clustered at its base; solemn Sweet William dianthus in sullen pink, clustered in beds around the headstone, for the child who is gone. Asphodel:  _ my regrets follow you to the grave. _

It reads, simply,  _ Duckling. _ It is Puffy’s oldest broken promise.)

“I can’t ever be sorry enough,” Puffy says, dull and quiet, and does not know which headstone she speaks to; to her entire graveyard-garden, maybe, overflowing with flowers and failures. To the boy who now has three headstones, all in a row. “You know I mean it.”

The flowers murmur, gossiping like ghosts. Puffy turns away.

**Author's Note:**

> idk how to feel about the fact that "tommyinnit is dead crabrave" has a canonical ao3 tag.
> 
> also solaine im not gifting this to you but i hope you know (if you end up reading this) that the duckling dream paragraphs were Absolutely for you


End file.
